Featured Database

Citations & abstracts some with full text cover a diversity of literature including scholarly journals, radical periodicals, books, book reviews, book chapters, theses & dissertations, bulletins, newsletters, internet documents and numerous other sources on the Left. Several thousand links to freely available and indexed full-text articles and documents on the web are now available.

Walter Havighurst Special Collections Current Exhibit

Stories from people who were children during World War II and the objects in this exhibit animate the past and inform us of a time when war took over daily life. “Retrospect is a very interesting thing,” says Ruthie Kallnder. “At the time I don’t recall any of the information we got as being propaganda,” but the government tried to influence children to make “necessary” sacrifices. Propagandists made the war a battle between good and evil, democracy and fascism. They also asked children to share in the war effort. In response, many children took on more responsibilities. Ruthie explains that boys and girls felt “if that’s what it was going to take” to win they “were willing to do it.” The memories of the people in this exhibit and their wartime actions show the power of propaganda’s messages and its lasting affect on their lives. Propaganda posters, children’s books, and classroom assignments demonstrate how propagandists reached children and involved them in the national war effort.

News & Notes

The Miami University Libraries Center for Digital Scholarship will be hosting a Digital Humanities Symposium on Tuesday October 23rd from 3:00-6:30 in King 320. This half day symposium will introduce faculty, graduate students and librarians to the field of Digital Humanities and begin a dialogue around related issues among interested parties on campus. We have invited two speakers who can shed light on the theories, practices, challenges and controversies and help us begin to examine the potential for Digital Humanities scholarship at Miami University. This symposium is being sponsored by the Miami University Humanities Center.

Our two speakers will be H. Lewis Ulman, Associate Professor of English and the Director of Digital Media Studies at Ohio State University, and Angela Courtney, Associate Librarian and Head, Arts and Humanities at Indiana University. H. Lewis Ulman has worked on the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives and will be talking about "What difference does 'digital' make to the humanities?". Angela Courtney has worked on the Victorian Women Writers Project and will be talking about the collaborations that can happen between libraries and departments around digital humanities projects.

In addition to our two speakers, we will have a presentation about our new Center for Digital Scholarship, demos of projects, and a roundtable of Miami University faculty discussing their projects. We will have faculty from a variety of departments, including Classics and English. We will also have refreshments and time for conversation!

We hope to see you there. If you are interested in attending, please consider filling out our registration form. It's not required, but it will help us get an idea of who is coming. Also, feel free to e-mail Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at hartsea@muohio.edu if you have any questions.

Hurricane season! Occasionally we get a taste in southwestern Ohio, such as tropical storm Isaac bringing rain a few weeks ago. Coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic and in the Caribbean know more fully the effects of these storms. One of the best-known is Katrina, which hit the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts on 27 August, 2005. The wind, the storm surge that it pushed inland, and the strains on the protection infrastructure in New Orleans devastated the region and the city. A month later, on 24 September, Rita came ashore near the Louisiana/Texas border, causing yet more damage, and impeding recovery and evacuation efforts of the earlier storm. Katrina remains the costliest storm in US history, with damages at about $108 billion. Rita’s damage was over $12 billion. Over 1200 deaths were attributed to Katrina, and more than 60 have been attributed to Rita.

Miami University Libraries have many materials in the collections. Search by subject: “Hurricane Katrina, 2005”. Here is a very small sampling, arrannged by library location.

“… After Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, tens of thousands of people lost their keepsakes and family treasures forever. As residents started to rebuild their lives, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans became a post-hurricane swapping place for old recipes that were washed away in the storm …”

This weekend the statue of Coach Paul Brown was unveiled in the Cradle of Coaches Plaza; in honor of the occasion we have a display of Paul Brown materials from the Cradle of Coaches Collection in the case outside Special Collections, on the 3rd floor of King Library. (Because the case is outside our secure area, these are facsimiles of the originals.) We hope you can stop by and enjoy the display as you stroll about on this beautiful fall weekend - before or after the game, of course. Go Redhawks!

And, as if that weren't enough reason to celebrate, 75 years ago today (Friday) J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit was published. Tolkien, a professor at Oxford University, created an incredibly rich, strange, yet familiar mythic world that we still enjoy exploring: hence the upcoming film trilogy from Peter Jackson.

Special Collections is proud to possess a first edition of The Hobbit in our collection, although sadly lacking the dustjacket. Last year it was one of the most popular selections by students assigned to analyze a modern first edition for an English 490 class.
Whether you are journeying through your own college memories or adventuring out of the Shire in search of dragons, the staff of Special Collections wish you a wonderful weekend.Elizabeth Brice
Assistant Dean for Technical Services and
Head, Special Collections & Archives

Today during a live tweeted event, @librarycongress announced that long-standing source of legislative information Thomas is going to be updated as congress.gov in a partnership between the Library of Congress, the House of Representatives, Senate, State Department, and the Government Printing Office. The new site is intended to offer a wide variety of legislative information all in one place, freely accessible to the public. The new design will be mobile friendly and will include live video, multi-media content, and full text search across legislative information.

In other changes to access to legislative information, after last years accquisition of LexisNexis Congressional by ProQuest (another provider of aggregated information products) The Miami University Libraries transition to the new ProQuest Congressional is complete and the new resource can be accessed anywhere on Miami’s network. ProQuest Congressional will offer all of the same historic collections and up-to-the minute information as LexisNexis Congressional. Containing the Congressional Record, Serial Set, Hearings and other information going back to the formation of the Congress ProQuest Congressional is a valuable resource for anyone interested United States history and current events.

We will of course have a variety of books about the history, culture, politics, geography, media, etc. about many different countries. Try doing a search in our book catalog for a country you are interested in and narrowing down to a particular aspect of the country.

The Miami U. Libraries now offer access to NBC Learn, a news archive of 12,000+ stories from the NBC News archives from 1920-present. It’s important to note that this database is available for On-campus use only at this time.

NBC Learn makes available to Miami users thousands of videos, historic newsreels, primary source documents, photographs, and more. Browse collections by subject, including the Current Events collection, offering content from 2009-present, and the Decision 2012 collection, providing content on the candidates, issues, and more.

All video, documents, and images are viewed in what NBC Learn calls a “Cue Card” which serves as a video player, image and document viewer, and flash card. Depending on the Cue Card type, you’ll see links on the rights side of the card. Click on the Transcripts link to view a transcript of the video or, in the case of the below Cue Card, click on Activity to view a student activity for teachers in the classroom. Flip any Cue Card over by clicking on the curved arrow in the top right of the card. This is where you’ll find information about the resource, such as source, creator, air/publish date, event date, and much more. For more info about using these features, read the Cue Cards section of the database’s Help tab.

This year's Banned Books Week will take place between September 30th and October 6th. You can find out about some of the events planned around the country and get helpful information at the Banned Books Week website.

King Library is marking this week with a display on the first floor of King in the foyer of the library. Since this month is also Hispanic Heritage Month, this year's display focuses on the 2010 Arizona House Bill 2281, which states that a school in Arizona cannot include in its classes any material that promotes the overthrow of the United States Government, promotes resentment towards a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, or advocates ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals. The Tucson Unified School District was found to be in violation of this law for offering courses in Mexican-American Studies. As a result, books and other materials were removed from the K-12 curriculum in Arizona. You can read about the list of materials that have been removed in this article.

We are featuring some of these titles in our display on the first floor of King and on our Pinterest board.

Today is the 11th anniversary of the 9/11. This tragic event in American history has had wide ranging effects in all facets of our world: politics, economics, psychology, media and more. It is an ideal of libraries to house and curate our collective memories, reactions and analysis of historical events.

To remember this event in our history, come to one of our libraries and check out a few of our nearly 500 books about 9/11.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature turns fifty this year. In its honor The New York Times published an interview with the founding editor M.H. Abrams and the current editor Stephen Greenblatt. It's interesting to read their thoughts on the importance of the anthology.

As you might expect, the library has several editions of this anthology. For instance, we have the 8th edition in our circulating collection.

Hamilton Library actually has the original 1962 edition in their library.

In addition to the English Literature Anthology, we of course have several other Norton Anthologies, including:

In the interview they mention wanting students to be able to carry the book around and read it anywhere, including under a tree. I honestly can't say I ever remember willingly carrying the book around with me because the edition I had was rather heavy. Still that edition has stayed with me over the years, and I do sometimes still refer back to it! Here's hoping that future generations of students continue to find this anthology useful.

The library now has access to New World Cinema: Independent Features & Shorts, 1990-Present. Currently, the database offers a collection of 182 full-length independent feature and short films, totaling 207 hours of video. Films from 1990-present are included. Many of these films have been presented at major film festivals and have been nominated for or won awards.

Faculty and students will find useful the classroom performance rights that come with the database, as well as the ability to create playlists of videos, clips, or images, and annotate sections of film. These features allow for use of database content in classroom lectures and presentations.

Search by title, actor, award, language, and more, or browse the database by director, actor, genre, country of origin, award, clip, or genre.